The following prayers come were created by me as the liturgist for September 2, 2012 at my home church of Wellington Ave. United Church of Christ. I chose to focus my Call to Confession on the lectionary texts for the Sunday: Song of Solomon 2:8-13 and Mark 7:1-8, 14-15,21-23. As is the tradition in my church the liturgist leads the first half of the service which includes The Call to Confession, Unison Prayer of Confession, and Words of Assurance. If it is a Communion Sunday then the liturgist will also preside at the table. I wrote an Invitation to the table based on the themes covered in the Confession and the texts of the day and the theme of gathering that Rev. Mousin used in his preaching about labor and Labor Day.
Call to Confession
I love this
morning’s Hebrew texts especially this joyous poem from the Song of Songs.
Whether you believe it is about God’s love for Israel as Jewish scholars have
taught or God’s love for the church as Christians have taught or a mystical
snapshot on romantic and sensual love, it is all about how holiness is
intimate, beautiful, and invitational. It’s about what God’s love can teach us about human love, or what human love can teach us about God’s
love.
And maybe because
of this, early church father Origen advises against us talking about these
texts too much, “I advise and counsel
everyone who is not yet rid of vexations of the flesh and blood, and has not
ceased to feel the passions of this bodily nature to refrain from reading the
book and the things that will be said about it.”
Is love only for
those who would describe themselves as “rid of
vexations of the flesh and blood” or has “ceased to feel passions” of a “bodily
nature?” There seems to me to be a
huge fear of the body here and a fear of the erotic in general, such that even
talking about it might… might what? Might
make us want to do things we shouldn’t? Might
suggest we have an embodied faith? that
we are called to love our Lord our God with all our heart, mind, soul, and body.
So this lovely springtime
love lyric comes along in our lectionary at the end of summer, accompanying a
New Testament text about purity laws and defilement. It comes after the feeding stories where real
people are literally fed.
This text also
comes after weeks of attacks on women and their bodies. It has been so bad that
some have called it a War on Women.
It
has been so intense and crazy that women have even been called sluts for simply
wanting birth control. One was even asked to leave the legislative assembly for
saying Vagina in public. And how some, mostly white men, have suggested that
there is a difference between legitimate and illegitimate rape and that you
can’t get pregnant from rape because the body knows how to shut down to prevent
this from taking place.
This combination
of fear and ignorance of the human reproductive system and sexuality is truly
frightening and deserves our faithful attention as much as the other social,
economic, and political issues we work on here at Wellington. The repercussions of this war are lethal---
real women are being denied healthcare and real women are having unwanted
pregnancies due to rape.
But this fear of
women and their bodies is also about fear of Women’s power, just follow what is
happening to our Catholic sisters who are being asked to pull back on their
social justice work and focus more on abortion issues or else… Their orders are
on censored lockdown with a few brave souls speaking out.
And this fear is
not limited to women, this fear of bodies and the erotic, it’s an ongoing
denial of rights for our GLBT sisters and brothers, denying them healthcare,
marriage, even leadership roles in our faith communities. Sexual orientation
and identity are even side-lined in our comprehensive sexual health programs
and as NBC in Utah has just shown not appropriate for their viewing audience
when they censored “The New Normal” a new TV show about two gay men starting a
family.
Perhaps Origen was
right we are not ready to read these texts but not because we are not finished
with exploring our erotic passions but because we don’t even know where or how
to begin, how to integrate our bodies into our faith, our lives.
And so I turn to
the Song of Songs, to Jesus’ healing stories about touching lepers and “unclean
women” for some relief, some perspective. And then there comes this lectionary
text about purity and impurity, a toe to toe with the Pharisees about washing
your hands of all things. Jesus manages to make washing your hands secondary to
the issues of clean hearts and actions. He uses this confrontation to once
again remind us that it is not what goes into the body that is too be feared
but what comes out.
“Then he called the crowd and said to them,
“Listen to me, all of you, and understand: there is nothing outside a person
that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile”
or as the Message translation puts it, “It’s
not what you swallow that pollutes your life; it’s what you vomit---that’s the
real pollution.”
“For it is from within, from the human heart
that evil intentions come”
“It’s what comes out of a person that
pollutes.”
“All
evil comes from within, and they defile a person,” ---“there is the source of pollution.”
Defilement or
pollution comes from within. It includes actions like murder and theft,
adultery and greed, slander and obscenities, arrogance and foolishness. All of
these come from within.
So to finish this
morning, I invite you this week to meditate or pray on the ways you have defiled yourself
or others or when you yourself have felt defiled.
As you do this remember to breathe.
You might use your outbreath as a breath of letting go, letting God.
In addition, when
you see or hear about others defiling others, stand up, speak out. Your silence
makes you complicit. As the late Howard Zinn said, “You cant’ be neutral on a
moving train.”
Join me now in our
Prayer of Confession as we collectively bring forward to God the ways we as a
community have missed the mark, polluted our environment, not responded yet to
God’s invitation.
Unison Prayer of Confession
Beloved, you invite us to love you with our whole selves---playful, sensual, fun, and romantic. You invite us to encounter the world, not
escape from it, to become intoxicated with the fragrance of the fruits of your
creation. You invite us into a heavenly and earthly intimacy. Beloved, you
invite us to love each other with our whole selves—dirty hands and all, to walk
the talk, to speak to our shadow sides, to let go of self judgments that
declare us “defiled”, or project onto others our sense of impurity. You invite us into a relationship where the
actions of our hearts are stronger than the laws we have created to worship
you. Your holiness is based on wholeness not purity. We confess that without your embodied desire
for us to arise and meet you, we would most likely stay put in our prisons of
shame and set up border patrols against all those we have decided are “other”
or unworthy. Forgive us these trespasses
and those who trespass against us. Help
us to know and live the truth that we are deeply loved, imperfect and flawed as
we are. Beloved, pour your grace upon us
this morning, anoint us to sing your songs of love and justice. Amen.
Words of Assurance
Arise dear ones, our Beloved calls each one of us into the
dance of life to enjoy the fruits of creation. Intimacy, sexuality, leaping and
bounding around like gazelles are all permissible. Eating with dirty hands with common folk are also permissible
for what God demands of us is not purity but faithfulness between our heart and
our actions. Our bodies are temples but
they are also instruments of love.
And when we are not in alignment, when we are polluting the
world with our defiling actions towards ourselves, others and creation, God’s
love is still there---wide enough to forgive us if we are willing to name these
transgressions and truly seek help or repentance. For God’s love is like a GPS
device which seeks to keep us on the path, no matter how many wrong turns we
make. God does not punish us, but seeks to correct our mistakes by
recalculating the route. Finally, God wants our partnership, loves us like a lover,
wants union with us like a marriage. These are our assurances.
Reflection Before Invitation
We cannot love God
unless we love each other,
and to love we must
know each other.
We know God in the breaking of bread,
and we know each
other in the sharing of bread,
and we know we are
not alone any more.
Heaven is a banquet,
too, even with a crust,
where there is
companionship.
Dorothy Day, in
The Long Loneliness
Invitation to The Table
As bread that was
scattered on the hillside,
was gathered
together and made one,
so too, we, your
people,
scattered throughout
the world,
are gathered
together around your table
and become one.
As grapes grown in
the field
are gathered
together and pressed into wine,
so too are we drawn
together
and pressed by our
times to share a common lot
and are transformed
into your life-blood
for all.
So let us prepare to
eat and drink
as Jesus taught us
with hands cleaned or not.
Let us invite the
stranger, the outcast, the “defiled”, the worker, the immigrant, the gay,
lesbian, bisexual, or transgendered
to our table----all are welcome. There are no guest lists.
May those who are
absent from this table serve to remind us
of the divisions
this Eucharist seeks to heal.
May their presence
help transform us
into the whole body
of Christ we share.
* Invitation Prayer was adapted from a Prayer attributed to the Iona Community
